Rose sighed. ‘Is this to be yet another of our unsolved mysteries, Pa? We are certainly accumulating them at regular intervals.’
Faro shook his head. Approaching Solomon’s Tower, they stood aside on the road as a hiring car swept past them from Duddingston direction.
What were they to tell Sven? That they were no further forward, that their visit to Alice Yesnaby had been a waste, not only of time, but for Faro, one of the precious remaining days with his daughters in Edinburgh.
A surprise awaited him.
They were indeed further forward. It was Imogen who provided the missing clue.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
In the course of conversation, Emily had told Imogen about the mysterious visit of the royal yacht anchored offshore nearby Yesnaby House, and remembering Faro had mentioned that Imogen had once been a guest, she asked what it was like being entertained by royalty.
Imogen smiled. ‘Sure now, and it was a great experience, not to be missed. Once in a lifetime, I thought, when the invitation came to a party on the Victoria and Albert III cruising off the west coast and to be harboured overnight in County Cork.
‘That was two years ago and fortunately we were both home at the time. Faro wasn’t invited, which was just as well,’ she added slyly, ‘seeing as I got along very well with HM. He is a great flirt, and he seemed to like me’ – she sounded surprised – ‘with all those lovely women around, yet he had somehow singled me out for his special attention.’
Emily smiled. It did not surprise her in the least, seeing that Imogen Crowe, already a famous authoress, and with her lovely Irish accent, also combined beauty with brains. No wonder he had decided that she should have a free pardon for her imprisonment as an Irish terrorist. Her uncle, a member of the Irish Republican Army, a fanatical patriot who was also her guardian, had brought her from Carasheen to London with him, where he planned to assassinate Queen Victoria. The plan failed, he took his own life but the police put her in prison as an accessory. She was fifteen, an orphan, and when at last she was freed on lack of evidence, she was sent back to Ireland but forbidden re-entry to the United Kingdom.
‘I had the greatest time on that yacht. HM suggested I might come along on one of their cruises sometime. Fat chance of that, I thought, knowing exactly what that wicked man had in mind, and I had better things to do than join the long queue of his mistresses. But I was flattered to be invited and I made a lot of influential contacts for it was only months after that I got my free pardon.’
She stopped suddenly, her eyes widened and she snapped her fingers in the air. ‘Holy Jesus! I’ve got it, Emily – at last!’
Emily stared at her. What on earth was she on about?
‘That Alice, I knew I wasn’t wrong that I had met her before, but for the life of me, I couldn’t think where. I meet so many lovely young girls like her all over the world. But now, I’ve got it: it was in Cork on the King’s yacht.’ And drumming her fingers on the table, she went on, ‘Let me think, it’s all coming back now. She was on the cruise, a lady’s maid to someone or other, and she helped me when I got my lace gown torn in the dancing – I thought it was done for. I was mad because I bought it in Paris and it was wildly expensive, but she had noticed it and said she was used to this sort of thing, she’d fix it. It happened to the ladies all the time and those men dancing the reels didn’t know their own strength, great strong brutes.’
And this triggered off Emily’s memory. Sven’s damsel in distress had come from Cork. She had been on the royal yacht.
‘What was her name? Can you remember?’
Imogen frowned, shook her head. ‘Lily … Lil … No, no. I’m usually good at names. It wasn’t that. Something similar – Lindy?’
That fitted. Emily whispered: ‘Lindsay. Lindsay Minton.’
Imogen looked at Emily wide-eyed. ‘She must have guessed that I recognised her. Now I know why she always seemed to be avoiding me, although I made little of it. I didn’t realise that was the reason, I thought she was just naturally a bit shy and standoffish with all of us.’
At this point Faro and Rose arrived home, weary from their seemingly pointless trip to Aberdeen. Greeting them, Imogen was quick to tell them what she and Emily had just discovered. So Alice Yesnaby was Lindsay Minton, the girl who jumped overboard and who Sven had rescued and helped to return to Ireland.
They looked at each other in horror, as the thought struck home.
Rose said: ‘If Lindsay became Alice, then Sven must have known.’
Faro nodded grimly. ‘They must have been in this together. But there must have been a reason, some kind of plan, a motive.’
Rose frowned. What could have been strong enough? And they remembered meaningless incidents that now had a deadly reason as Rose recalled Emily saying: ‘She sits in the house all day as if she is waiting for something to happen.’
Now they knew what that something had been.
‘The vandalised garden at Yesnaby,’ said Rose. ‘I remember Alice’s filthy fingernails. Of course, she had been with Sven and they had been searching for something.’
Emily had said nothing but seemed in a state of shock, there was so much she could not take in or did not want to believe of these revelations. She whispered: ‘The Maid of Norway’s dowry?’
‘Perhaps,’ said Faro and snapped his fingers. ‘No! We’re missing the real reason, something more tangible than an old legend.’
Emily said: ‘The Yesnaby Jewel.’ And Faro remembered his visit to Mr Jacob just days ago and the old jeweller telling him about the enquirer who had wanted a thousand pounds for it. His description of that ‘lovely young woman’ certainly didn’t fit Emily. But it fitted Alice/Lindsay exactly.
He looked at his daughter. ‘Tell me, have you taken the jewel to be valued yet?’
Emily sighed. ‘No, I’ve still got to do that before we go back to Yesnaby.’
‘You were never in financial difficulties and asked Mr Jacob, the old jeweller in the Pleasance here, to buy it for a thousand pounds?’
Emily gave a shocked exclamation. ‘Of course not. I’ve never met this Mr Jacob. Where on earth did you get that idea that I would ever sell the jewel? Fancy you believing such a lie!’
There was a sudden stillness.
Faro and Rose exchanged a look and without another word, they rushed upstairs. Followed by Emily into her bedroom where she unlocked a drawer in the dressing table. And the jewel was there, in its case.
Sighing wearily she closed the drawer. ‘I took your advice, although I’m so used to seeing it I would never notice if it wasn’t hanging among the rest of my necklaces.’
They were astonished that she took so little care of it. ‘Really, Em,’ Rose said, ‘going out all day with the children and leaving the door unlocked.’
The Tower was like that: they used the kitchen door so that Thane had easy access. It could be bolted from the inside and they reckoned that he was a sufficient deterrent to keep any intruder at bay. However, neither Rose nor Jack could decide where the key was, and indeed, if they had ever seen one.
‘We never lock doors in Yesnaby. Oh, don’t tell me we might have had a burglary here, when I was out,’ groaned Emily.
No, but it was a simple matter for the bogus Alice to take the jewel and try to raise a thousand pounds. Faro said: ‘When you were out, certainly. But not a burglar.’
‘I don’t understand, Pa. What do you mean?’
‘I mean, Em, someone from inside.’
Emily looked shocked and bewildered. ‘But that isn’t possible, not one of us.’
Faro let that sink in and said slowly, ‘Tell me, where is Sven?’
‘He’s gone, left just before you arrived.’
‘Gone where?’ Faro demanded.
‘Back to Orkney. He took a hiring cab from Duddingston. Going for a ship at Leith. Said it’s been on his conscience, not telling the authorities about Miss Minton in case they are still looking for her. And this business about Alice, poor Sven,
he just can’t understand it.’
Faro and Rose gave her a hard look, not entirely without sympathy, and Rose said: ‘That’s a pity, Em, because the rest of us can.’
Emily merely shook her head. ‘Poor Sven, he told me not to worry, that he would come back.’ She was still refusing to recognise the truth about Sven, still willing to be blinkered when the obvious was striking everyone else.
But Emily had a secret. What they didn’t know – or perhaps could not understand – was that they were making a terrible mistake. Sven was coming back for her. He was going to marry her. He loved her, he said, and had always loved her.
When the children were told that Sven had left, Magnus nodded. ‘He tried to kill me, you know, that night on the loch. He deliberately hit me with the oar. I tried to tell you but you wouldn’t listen, Ma. You insisted that it was an accident, that Sven would never do that. You said he was fond of me.’ He looked at her for a reassuring comment, but there was none. With a shrug he added: ‘Maybe he was sorry, because he has been very nice to me ever since.’
‘Yes,’ Meg said solemnly. ‘I’ve noticed that he has been especially nice to Magnus but he gives Thane a wide berth. He’s scared of him, and I don’t think Thane has ever liked him, right from when you first came.’
‘How can you tell that?’ Emily demanded.
Meg shrugged. ‘I just know.’
As they all remembered the wrecked boat and Sven’s surprise at finding Magnus, rescued by Thane and safely back at the Tower, Emily put her hand to her mouth, an agonised cry: ‘I can’t believe that. Not Sven – oh no!’
The two children were watching them eagerly. They never quite understood what grown-ups were going on about but this looked interesting, especially as they had seen him leave and he had been very brusque with Meg when she asked him if he was going somewhere exciting and could they go with him.
‘Are you going on the train?’ Magnus asked.
Sven had growled. ‘None of your business.’
‘When are you coming back?’ Meg asked, and he had almost pushed her aside as he rushed out.
‘Will Sven be coming back to Yesnaby with us?’ Magnus asked Emily, rather hoping the answer would be ‘no’. Instead his mother regarded him tearfully and Imogen, Grandfather’s lady – now one of his favourite people – stepped in and said: ‘Would you two like me to read the next chapter of the story I am writing about two Irish children who go for a holiday in a haunted castle in the middle of a loch in Kerry?’
‘Yes, please!’
‘Upstairs to your room, then.’
As the children dashed out, Faro put a delaying hand on her arm. ‘I didn’t know you wrote children’s stories.’
She smiled at him sweetly. ‘Neither did I, but this conversation is rather unsuitable for children, don’t you think?’
‘Thanks,’ said Rose. ‘You’re a gem.’
As the door closed, Faro thumped his hands on the table. ‘Listen, all of you. This speculation isn’t getting us anywhere.’ And to Emily in particular, ‘We must face facts. Sven has gone, he’s a thief and a liar—’
‘But where is Alice?’ Rose interrupted.
‘I think I know the answer to that.’ Faro had been very thoughtful, his expression grave. He gave her a long, slow look.
‘Alice is dead.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
‘Alice dead! You can’t mean that, Pa,’ said Emily.
Faro turned to her. ‘I do mean that. Alice is dead and Sven has killed her, and made his escape before her body is found.’
A numbed silence greeted this shattering thought.
At last Rose said: ‘Presuming you are right, Pa. How and why?’
‘Let’s deal with why first. They were in it together. This Miss Minton he rescued, and maybe that was where he got the whole idea of passing her off as Alice Yesnaby. But she was no longer of any use to him. She had served his purpose and the failure to raise a thousand pounds made him realise that she knew too much. She was getting nervous and might betray him—’
And Rose remembered those hours she sat, restless, bored and Emily saying it was as if she was waiting for something to happen. As Faro went on: ‘He knew he had to get rid of her and get the jewel himself.’
‘Always the jewel,’ cried Emily. ‘Then why is it still upstairs, why didn’t he take it with him. That doesn’t make any sense.’
‘You locked it away, remember. And we were due back. What if we walked in? That was him in the hiring car we met on the road.’
Rose looked at Emily’s stricken, bewildered face as she whispered so that the others didn’t hear, ‘They are wrong about Sven. He loves me. He’s promised to come back for me. We’re getting married.’
Rose stared at her in astonishment. Poor Em, she still wants to believe that there has been a terrible mistake, that he is an innocent victim, this protégé of Erland’s who had been such a friend to the family, remembering grateful smiles and those repeated words: whatever could we do without him? Now that was finished and done with and she still couldn’t take in that this young man she had set her heart on was in fact a ruthless killer.
‘I can’t take any more of this,’ Emily said out loud. ‘You are all wrong,’ and she ran out to the garden and left them.
Watching her, Faro said grimly, ‘We can presume the girl didn’t know what was coming to her. Look outside – Arthur’s Seat is made for murder, with eminently suitable places where corpses could be tucked away and lie hidden for years.’
‘And he had plenty of opportunities on those evening walks they took together, to find a perfect hiding place,’ Rose said with a shudder, gazing out of the window across the vast expanse of the extinct volcano on the slope of which Edinburgh’s residential south side had taken shape.
Faro looked over her shoulder. ‘I would hazard a guess that one of the many secret caves that the children took him with them to explore was marked down as Alice’s future tomb.’ He looked out of the window at the darkening sky. There would be no moon tonight.
Jack came home. Faro and Rose took him aside and related the day’s dire revelations. He listened carefully, said that he found it unbelievable. Not only that Sven was a thief and a liar, but a killer. ‘You’d be hard-pressed to see a more open, honest-looking face.’
Faro murmured: ‘“Oh what may man within him hide/Though angel on the outward side.”’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Jack stared at him in amazement. ‘What’s that all about?’
‘Shakespeare,’ Faro replied. ‘In simple words: murderers usually look no different to a man or woman you would walk past in Princes Street any day of the week.’
Giving his son-in-law a wry glance, he didn’t add that in fifty years with the Edinburgh City Police, he had yet to encounter a murderer bearing the brand of Cain across his forehead.
‘I hope you’ve got it wrong about Alice,’ Jack said, ‘seems a bit of a wild speculation to me.’ He shrugged. ‘Better begin your search in the morning. I’d like the children kept out of this.’
‘We need Meg’s help, Jack.’
He looked at her sharply. He hated the thought of anything remotely unpleasant touching his little daughter. But Rose was right: Meg knew Arthur’s Seat.
‘So be it.’
It was doubtful if any slept well that night and Rose guessed by her sister’s red-rimmed eyes what those hours of darkness had been for her.
Sadie was the only one not involved in this grim drama. She was her usual brisk, cheerful self, although it was obvious from the family’s silence and their unsmiling expressions over their breakfast porridge that something was amiss. She hoped it was not her cooking.
Jack prepared to leave for the Central Office. ‘I wish I could come with you, only to prove that you are wrong. I can’t wish you luck, I can only hope that there is another explanation.’
The early morning mist that so often hid Arthur’s Seat had given place to bright sunshine, radiant over an innocent landscape and out of
keeping with the grim task ahead.
Meg and Magnus were thrilled to have Grandpa with them on what was to be just a pleasant walk, for him to see the caves. He had told Magnus on one of their picnics, how when he was a little lad playing with some other children they had discovered fourteen tiny coffins buried in a cave. The identities of the tiny dressed dolls, who or why they had been put there, was a mystery yet to be solved and perhaps one of the reasons that had made him a detective.
Watching the two children racing ahead brought him the ominous feeling that, so many years later, he was in for a grimmer discovery, a dead girl in one of those caves.
Emily was in a state of shock, silent and withdrawn among her tortured thoughts, and Imogen, saying she would stay with her, handed Faro a glove that Alice had worn.
Rose eyed it scornfully. ‘Thane isn’t a bloodhound.’
‘No, but he’s a hunter. Knows a lot more than we humans do about tracking down prey and I suspect he will know what we are looking for,’ Faro added grimly.
Without the least idea of what was involved and having been informed that Grandpa would enjoy this nostalgic tour, Meg was delighted to take the lead. It was rough-going in places and Faro, feeling the effects of the steep climb, decided that his intuition had been wrong when at last they came downhill again towards Samson’s Ribs and were just above Duddingston Loch.
Meg said: ‘I left this one until last.’
Magnus said: ‘It’s my favourite and very well hidden because some of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s army camped on Arthur’s Seat when he had Edinburgh under siege.’
‘And down there,’ Meg pointed, ‘is the house in Causewayside where the Prince and his officers stayed while they were planning the campaign.’
The cave was certainly well hidden and as they went nearer, Meg moved the overhanging vegetation aside and said indignantly, ‘That’s not right. It’s hard enough to find but someone has been here and put a lot of stones in the entrance.’
The Darkness Within Page 21